Chapter I

The One God

And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. (Deuteronomy 34:10.)

If Moses existed he is arguably history's most influential figure. His words are the foundation of faith for over half the earth's population. The great monotheistic religions of the modern world derived from the holy laws he is said to have revealed to the ancient Israelites. Moses' God became not only the God of Judaism but of Christianity and Islam.

'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.'

These are the words from the Jewish Shema, contained in chapter 6, verses 4 to 7 in the biblical book of Deuteronomy, still considered Judaism's most important commandment. Christians too accept this passage as central to their faith. According to chapter 12, verses 28 to 30 in the New Testament gospel of Mark, when asked what was the most important commandment, Jesus replied:

'The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.'

The words are echoed in the Adhán, the Islamic call to prayer:

'God is great. I bear witness that there is no deity but God'.

Regardless of how each of these religions and their many different creeds interpret the scriptures, all believe that there is only one God and the acceptance of that fact is the most fundamental principle of their faith. According to the Bible, this commandment was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai - the mountain of God - nearly three and a half thousand years ago.

Before the apparent time of Moses there is no evidence that anyone in the world had ever considered worshipping just one god - not even the Israelites. Archaeology has revealed that the early Semites, the nomadic tribes who eventually became the Israelites, had many gods, as demonstrated by the numerous statuettes found in their graves. Even the Bible confirms that there was no such thing as the Israelite religion before Moses. Although God is portrayed as speaking directly to a few of Moses' forebears, such as Abraham and Jacob, there is no reference to the worship or acceptance of God by the Israelites as a whole. Even Moses has no idea who this God is when he first confronts him. According to the Old Testament book of Exodus, Moses first discovers God on the mountain of God when he speak to him from a burning bush:

'Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest of Midian: and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb. And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.' (Exodus 3:1-4.)

From the biblical perspective this is where, when and how the Israelite religion first came into existence. For centuries after it was only the Israelites, also called the Hebrews, who followed this single god religion. This God was a unique concept. Not only in that it was a single, universal deity, but that it had no name. Unlike other ancient gods, he was addressed as Yhwh or Yahweh, which later translators of the Bible rendered as Jehovah - a word that meant simply 'the Lord'. Acceptance of this same Lord as the only God is central to every modern culture of eastern and western Europe, the Middle East, north and south America, most of Africa and much of Asia. He had been the God of the late Roman Empire, the God of Byzantium, the God of the Arabs, the God of the crusaders, the God of the conquistadors and the God of the Victorian missionaries. Originally, however, he was only the God of the Israelites.

Until around 600 BCE the Israelites had maintained an insular existence along a fertile strip of land that is now the state of Israel, the West Bank and southern Jordan. Called Canaan by the Egyptians and Palestine by the Greeks and Romans, it stood at the crossroads of the great civilisations of Africa, Asia Minor and the Near East. According to the Bible, this had once had been the united Hebrew kingdom of Israel, but by the time the area was opened up to the rest of the world only a small, autonomous Hebrew state remained - the kingdom of Judah around the city of Jerusalem. Later called Judea by the Romans, this was to be the kingdom of Herod, the province of Pontius Pilate and the land where Jesus was born and died.

In 597 BCE, Judah was invaded by the Babylonians and thereafter the culture and religion of the inhabitants - the Jews - gradually became known to the rest of the world. Once the unique, monotheistic religion of the Jews became disseminated, its influence just continued to grow. When Alexander the Great annexed Palestine in 333 BCE many of the Greeks who settled in the area converted to the Hebrew God and Judaism, as we now know it, began to evolve. Although the word Jew had once referred only to a citizen of Judah, the term was now applied to any convert to the Jewish God. Indeed, by the time of the Roman occupation of Palestine even the Jewish monarchy was Greek. In the first century CE, Christianity developed from Judaism and by the early forth century it had become the state religion of the Roman Empire. When the Roman Empire collapsed and the new Arab empires arose throughout the Middle East, they too continued to venerate the same God.

Today there are so many different sects, denominations and cults following the one God that it is impossible to keep track of them all. The Roman Catholic Church is by far the largest Christian movement with almost a billion Catholics worldwide. The mainstream protestants boast around 300 million members, which include the Anglicans, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists and Presbyterians, with an additional 30 million Baptists. The Quakers, also known as The Society of Friends, have a world total of around 200,000 members; the Unitarians have a world total of around 500,000 members and the Pentecostals have an estimated 10 million following. Then there are the rapidly growing offshoot Christian movements. The Jehovah's Witnesses have an estimated 3 million members, the Mormons, or Church of Jesus Christ and the Later-day Saints, have a worldwide membership of around 6 million; Seventh Day Adventist membership is around 200,000 and Christian Science has around 140,000 followers. Eastern Europe has it own Orthodox Church with over 130 million adherents. Of the non-Christian movements, there are around 18 million Jews and well over a billion Moslems. And all this began with a small nation in Palestine that seems to have been virtually unknown to the world until 597 BCE.

The only history we have of the Hebrews before this time is contained in the Jewish Tanak - what the Christians call the Old Testament of the Bible. Although it covers the history of the Hebrews for over a millennium before the Babylonian invasion, it does not appear to have been written until around 550 BCE.

The events which the Old Testament describes surrounding the inception of the Hebrew religion scarcely sound credible to modern thinking. Going by biblical chronology, it begins somewhere around 1300 BCE. It starts with Moses speaking to God in a burning bush, and is furthered when the Israelites escape bondage in Egypt after being helped by a series of divine plagues. Following the escape, when God divides the waters of the Red Sea, the Israelites are guided through the wilderness by an enormous pillar of fire. They are able to conquer Canaan after the impregnable walls of Jericho miraculously fall down. There follows the age of heroes, such as the mighty Sampson, who single-handedly pulls down the Philistine temple of Dagon, and King David who kills the giant Goliath in single combat. Then, around 1000 BCE, there comes the golden age of Solomon, when the wise king becomes the wealthiest man on earth and Jerusalem is the richest city in the world. Finally, there is the age of prophets whose lives are surrounded by wondrous events, such as Elijah who ascends to heaven in a flaming chariot and Ezekiel who is visited by God on a flying throne.

Despite these biblical claims, there is no contemporary record of any of these figures. Neither is there a single contemporary account of any of these miracles. Even the Egyptian records, of which many survive, say nothing of the plagues of the Exodus that apparently included events that could hardly be ignored, such as day turning to night and the Nile turning to blood. Archaeology has excavated nothing in Jerusalem from the supposed time of Solomon to reveal anything but a relatively low level of culture. As for the surrounding empires, if their records are any indication, they do not seem to have even noticed that Jerusalem was there.

When Moses was apparently revealing the laws of God to the Israelites the kingdom of Egypt had been in existence for over two thousand years and the pyramids of Giza had been standing for almost as long. Egypt was at the height of its power and the eighteenth-dynasty pharaohs, which included the infamous Tutankhamun and Rameses the Great, where on the throne. In Mesopotamia the Babylonian Empire stretched through Iran and Iraq and the Hittites of Turkey were establishing their own empire throughout Asia Minor. In the Mediterranean the Minoans of Crete had created an empire based on sea power that covered the Aegean. Britain was seeing the building of Stonehenge and in India Hinduism was established and the hymns of the Rig-Veda were being composed.

By the time Solomon was on the throne, the Egyptian and Hittite empires had collapsed, the Minoans had been overrun by the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece and the seafaring Phoenicians of Lebanon had taken control of the Mediterranean. By the time of the Babylonian invasion of Judah, the Assyrian empire had risen and fallen, the Tarquin dynasty had been founded in Rome, and the Hellenic city states had risen to prominence in Greece. The Persian Empire was established in what is now Iran, and the Iron Age Celts had spread throughout much of northern Europe and the British Isles. At the very time the Old Testament seems to have been written Lao-Tse was founding Taoism in China, Zen Buddhism was evolving in Japan and the first oracle of Delphi was installed in Thessaly. If the Bible is to be believed, throughout all this time, and with all these changes going on in the world, the one God religion of the Hebrews survived and thrived.

Modern thinking is somewhat polarised concerning how this religion really developed. On the one hand there are the fundamentalists who accept every word of Old Testament account as historical fact, and on the other there are the sceptics who maintain that it was not until late in their history that the Israelites conceived of monotheism. To the former, it is blasphemous to question the biblical account, and to the latter it is just too preposterous to contemplate. In the middle are the historians whose consensus tends to be that, although monotheism may have developed well before the Babylonian invasion, the story of how it originated did not take shape until this time. They reason that many of these biblical stories were inspired by the Jews' captivity in Babylon. After Judah was invaded, the Babylonians returned with the majority of Jerusalem's citizens as slaves and it was amongst them, during this so-called Babylonian Exile, that the accounts were complied. It is argued that the story of Moses and the Exodus was an allegory: perhaps based on the visions of a religious leader concerning how God had long ago delivered his people from bondage and would soon do so again. Likewise, the golden age of Solomon is considered nothing more than a fable of a time of passed glory that would one day return. The Jerusalem of Solomon was merely a copy of Babylon, at the time of the Exile, the most splendid city in the world. As for the exploits of ancient Israelite heroes and the lives of the prophets, these were little more than folklore such that exists in every ancient culture. Finally, there are the archaeologists who generally regard the ancient Hebrews as a loose alliance of unsophisticated Bronze Age tribes, fighting a precarious existence in a no-man's land, hemmed in between the mighty empires of the Middle East and Asia Minor.

One thing that is certain is that by the time of the Babylonian invasion in 597 BCE the Jews did have a single God known as Yahweh. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar actually records the destruction of the Jew's chief centre of worship - the Jerusalem Temple. Beside the Old Testament, however, there is little to go on as to how this religion actually came about. From the historical perspective it is certainly one of the world's greatest enigmas.

At one time I tended to agree with the popular consensus that much of the Old Testament history was little more than mythology. That was until I examined the biblical account of the plagues of the Exodus. In the mid 1990s I was working on my book Act of God that concerned the 3000-year old mystery of an Egyptian tomb. The period of Egyptian history I was investigating included the period in which the Exodus story seems to have been set. Astonishingly, I discovered that a natural catastrophe occurred in Egypt around this time that closely matched the plagues of the Exodus as described in the Old Testament.

According to the Old Testament account in the book of Exodus, when the pharaoh refused Moses' demands to let the Israelite slaves leave Egypt, God punishes the Egyptians by a series of what the Bible calls plagues: darkness over the land, the Nile turning to blood, fiery hail storms, cattle deaths, a plague of boils and infestations of frogs, lice, flies and locusts. To the modern mind it all sounds very much like myth and legend. However, such events may have been the result of a natural catastrophe - a gigantic volcanic eruption.

First of all there is the plague of darkness. This might have been the result of a massive cloud of fallout ash. One of the largest eruptions in recent years was the Mount Saint Helens eruption in Washington State USA in 1980. After the eruption the sun was obscured for hours 800 kilometres from the volcano, and after the even larger eruption on the island of Krakatau near Sumatra in 1883 the skies were darkened to a much greater distance - it was actually as dark as night for days on end over 1000 kilometres away. According to Exodus 10: 21-23:

'And the Lord said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand towards heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, even darkness that may be felt. And Moses stretched forth his hand towards heaven; and there was thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days: They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days: but all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.'

If just one of the ten plagues matched the effects of a volcanic eruption it would be interesting enough: the fact is, they all do. In Exodus 9:23-26, we are told that Egypt is afflicted by a terrible fiery hailstorm:

'And Moses stretched forth his rod toward heaven: and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and fire ran along upon the ground; and the Lord rained hail upon the land of Egypt. So there was hail and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous, such as there was none like it in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation. And the hail smote all throughout the land of Egypt, all that was in the field, both man and beast, and brake every tree in the field.'

This would be an accurate description of the dreadful ordeal suffered by the people on the Sumatra coast after the eruption of Krakatau - pellet-sized volcanic debris falling like hail; fiery pumice setting fires on the ground and destroying trees and houses; lightning flashing around, generated by the tremendous turbulence inside the volcanic cloud. Even after the lesser eruption of Mount Saint Helens, volcanic debris fell like hailstones, flattening crops hundreds of kilometres away.

The Exodus account of another of the plagues could easily be a report given by someone living in the states of Washington, Idaho and Montana, over which the volcanic fallout cloud was blown after the Mount Saint Helens eruption of 1980:

'And it shall become small dust in all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man, and upon beast...' (Exodus 9:9.)

Fine dust causing boils and blains! Hundreds of people were taken to hospital with skin sores and rashes after the Mount Saint Helens eruption, due to exposure to the acidic fallout ash, and livestock perished or had to be destroyed, due to prolonged inhalation of the volcanic dust. According to Exodus 9:6: 'And all the cattle of Egypt died'.

After the Mount Saint Helens eruption fish also died and were found floating on the surface of hundreds of kilometres of waterways. The pungent odour of pumice permeated everything, and water supplies had to be cut off until the impurities could be filtered from reservoirs. According to Exodus 7:21:'And the fish that was in the river died: and the river stank, and the Egyptians could not drink of the river, and there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt.'

As well as the grey pumice ash volcanoes blast skywards, many volcanoes, such as Krakatau, have another, more corrosive toxin in their bedrock - iron oxide. (This is the same red material that covers the surface of Mars.) At Krakatau thousands of tons of iron oxide were discharged killing fish for miles around. It would certainly explain the Exodus reference to the Nile turning to blood, as iron oxide would turn the river red: 'And all the waters that were in the river turned to blood' (Exodus 7:20).

The remaining plagues do not immediately suggest themselves as having anything to do with a volcanic eruption - frogs, flies, lice and locusts. However, they can be just as linked with volcanic activity as the fallout cloud itself. Those who have not suffered the dreadful effects of a volcanic eruption might imagine that once the eruption has subsided, the dead have been buried, the injured tended, and the immediate damage repaired, the survivors can begin the task of putting their lives back together, free from further volcanic horrors. This is very often far from true, as the entire ecosystem has been affected. Most forms of life suffer from volcanic devastation but, remarkably, some actually thrive.

After the blanketing of the countryside with fallout ash, crawling invertebrates and insects in their larval, pupal or egg stage would be safe underground, as would burrowing snakes and rodents; so also would frog-spawn, protected under submerged ledges. Insects have a short life cycle and accordingly reproduce at a frightening rate. After such a cataclysm, therefore, they have plenty of time to establish a head start on their larger predators and competitors. Moreover, compared to bigger animals, they reproduce in vast numbers. Swarming insects are therefore commonly associated with the aftermath of volcanic eruptions. Having survived the calamity, the ash-cover forces them to seek out new habitations and food supplies - and heaven help anyone who gets in the way!

An excellent example is the flesh-crawling aftermath of the Mount Pelee eruption on the island of Martinique in the West Indies in 1902. Volcanic debris covered the nearby port of St Pierre, killing over 30,000 people, but the horrors did not end there. The survivors endured a terrifying episode when huge swarms of flying ants descended upon the sugar plantations and attacked the workers. As they fled for their lives, the vicious creatures seared their flesh with dreadful acid stings. It was no fluke that the insect assaults had followed the eruption: the creatures had attacked before when Mount Pelee had erupted in 1851. On this occasion they not only drove away workers and devoured entire plantations, they were even reported to have attacked and killed defenceless babies while they were still in their cots. Three types of insect infested Egypt, according to the Exodus account: lice. flies and locusts.

'Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and smote the dust of the earth, and it became lice in man, and in beast; all the dust of the land became lice throughout all of the land of Egypt.' (Exodus 8:17.)

'Behold I will send swarms of flies upon thee, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thy houses: and the houses of the Egyptians shall be full of swarms of flies, and also the ground whereon they are.... And the Lord did so and there came a grievous swarm of flies... and the land was corrupted by reason of the swarm of flies.' (Exodus 8:21-24.)

'And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt: very grievous were they; before them there were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such. For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt.' (Exodus 10: 14-15.)

Frogs are perhaps the most prepared of all the vertebrates for such cataclysms: like insects, they produce vast numbers of offspring. Each frog lays literally thousands of eggs. Under normal conditions this is a biological necessity, as the tiny tadpoles emerge from the eggs almost completely defenceless. The only chance the species has for survival is in numbers. When frogspawn hatches, the local fish are in for a banquet and only one or two of the tadpoles ever survive to become frogs. However, after the Mount Saint Helens eruption the predatory fish were decimated. The tiny would-be frogs, on the other hand, were kept safe inside their spawn. By the time they emerged, the hazardous chemicals had washed away down river, but the fish had not yet returned. The result was a plague of frogs throughout much of Washington State. In their thousands, they littered the countryside - there were so many squashed on the roads that they made driving conditions hazardous: they clogged waterways, covered gardens, and infested houses. According to Exodus 8:2-8, this is exactly what happened to the ancient Egyptians:

'Behold, I will smite all thy boarders with frogs. And the river shall bring forth frogs abundantly, which shall come up and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneadingtroughs... And Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt; and the frogs came up, and covered the land of Egypt.'

Over the years, various scholars have individually attributed these plagues to different natural phenomena. The darkness could have been due to a particularly violent sandstorm, the hail the result of freak weather conditions. The boils could have been caused by an epidemic, and the bloodied river may have been the result of some seismic activity far to the south, near the Nile's source. Swarms of locusts, flies and infestation of lice would not have been that uncommon. However, the likelihood of them all happening at the same time seems just too remote. A volcanic eruption, however, would account for them all.

The only real problem with attributing the plagues of Egypt to a volcanic eruption is that they do not appear in the order that they would have occurred after such an event. The darkness and fiery hail would come first, followed by the sores, the bloodied river, dead cattle and fish, and some time later the frogs and insects. In Exodus they appear in a different order: blood, fish, frogs, lice, flies, cattle deaths, boils, hail, locusts and darkness. However, Exodus seems to have been written many centuries after the events being described. The account of the plagues might have been handed down orally for many generations and certain details could easily have been moved around.

When we realise just how similar the plagues of Egypt are to the terrible effects of a volcanic eruption, then these particular episodes of the Exodus account no longer seems so implausible. However, there still remains a big question mark. Did a volcanic eruption actually affect Egypt sometime around 1300 BCE, when the story of the Exodus appears to be set. There have been no known volcanoes in Egypt in recent geological times, but a large enough eruption to have afflicted the country did occur on the Aegean island of Thera sometime around the period in question.

Thera was the southernmost of the Greek Cyclades islands, and in the fifteenth century BCE it had supported an important trading port of the Minoan civilisation, centred on the nearby island of Crete. Today Thera is a crescent-shaped island, now called Santorini, forming a bay almost ten kilometres across. The cliffs surrounding it are ribbed with layers of volcanic debris and once molten rock, testifying to the island's violent past. The bay itself is actually a crater formed by the ancient eruption, and it is so deep that it is said that no ship's anchor reaches the bottom. In the 1930s, the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos was the first to propose that at some point towards the end of the Minoan period a gigantic volcanic eruption had all but destroyed the island. In 1956s two geologists, Dragoslav Ninkovich and Bruce Heezen of Columbia University USA, conducted a survey of the seabed to try to determine precisely how large the eruption had been. From their survey ship, the Vema, they were able to ascertain the exact size of the volcanic crater - fifty-one square kilometres - and from this, they estimate the incredible magnitude of the event.

There are various types of volcanic eruption: some spew forth rivers of molten lava, others produce searing mud slides, but by far the most devastating is when the pressure of the magma causes the volcano to literally blow its top. Going by the resultant crater size, that is what happened at Thera almost three and a half thousand years ago. It was, in fact, similar to the Mount St Helen's eruption when the explosion blasted away the mountainside with the power of a fifty megaton bomb.

In an instant, on the morning of 18 May 1980, a mass of searing volcanic material blasted outwards, killing every living thing within 251-square-kilometres. Thousands of acres of forest were flattened and molten debris covered everything like the surface of the moon. What had once been a bustling tourist resort over sixteen kilometres from the volcano was now covered entirely by pumice. Within a few hours, a cloud of ash some eight kilometres high, containing billions of tons of volcanic material, had rolled 800 kilometres east. In three states - Washington, Idaho and Montana - the massive volcanic cloud covered the sky and day was turned to night. Throughout the whole area ash fell like rain, clogging motor engines, halting trains and blocking roads. Seven million hectares of lush farmland now looked like a grey desert, and millions of dollars worth of crops were flattened and destroyed.

Mount St Helen's was one of the most destructive volcanic eruptions in recent years, yet compared with the explosion of Thera it was tiny. When Ninkovich and Heezen published their findings regarding the Thera explosion, they used the Krakatau eruption as a comparison. In August 1883 Krakatau exploded with a force twenty times that of Mount Saint Helens. The eruption was heard over 4800 kilometres away in Melbourne in southern Australia, a volcanic cloud rose eighty kilometres into the air, fallout ash covered thousands of square kilometres. Over 36,000 people perished! It has been estimated by the size of the resultant crater, that nine cubic kilometres of volcanic material blasted skywards from Krakatau - yet Thera's crater is almost six times bigger. Accordingly, the explosion would have been heard half way around the world, volcanic debris would have been hurled over a hundred kilometres high, and the ash fallout would have covered well over a million square kilometres.

The last nuclear weapon mankind used in warfare was the atom bomb that totally destroyed half the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945. It was a 20-kiloton explosion (the equivalent of 20,000 tons of conventional explosives). Mount Saint Helens exploded with a far greater force of 50,000 kilotons; Krakatau reached an incredible 1,000,000 kilotons; yet Thera dwarfs them both with a staggering 6,000,000 kilotons. It would take 6,000 of the most destructive modern nuclear warheads - each with the power to wipe out an entire city - to equal the explosive magnitude of Thera. It is estimated by adding the mass of the original volcano to the size of the crater that 114 cubic kilometres of debris was ejected skywards. It would have formed a massive fallout cloud that was blown in the direction of Egypt.

The ancient samples of pumice taken from the seabed during the Vema survey showed that the fallout cloud was carried on the wind towards Egypt. The Egyptian coast is only 800 kilometres from Thera. Judging by the affects of the smaller Mount Saint Helens and Krakatau eruptions at such a distance from the volcanoes, it is fairy certain that the land of Egypt would have suffered the full horrors of the fallout cloud. The Hebrews at the time, or the later Jews, may well have interpreted the event as the divine intervention of God.

Why such an event is not recorded in surviving Egyptian records is something I will return to later. The important point is that the biblical plagues no longer seemed as mythological as they once had, which begged the question: how many more episodes in the Old Testament might have been based on historical events? This is how my current investigation began. As the story of the Exodus plagues no longer seems so fantastic, perhaps the biblical story of the origins of the Hebrew religion warranted serious investigation. I decided to research not only the Bible, but also historical records and archaeological discoveries to see if I could find any evidence as to how it really came about. As the concept of the one God has been so influential in the world, and its inception is still an enigma to historians, it seemed to me that this was one of the world's greatest unsolved mysteries. What were the true origins of God?